Tag Archives | Conspiracy Theory

From 9/11 to McCarthyism, we have a long history of conspiracy theories — and government acts have encouraged them.

Hey, did you hear that President Obama purposefully allowed Ebola to enter the United States so America will be more like Africa?

That’s what conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly said earlier this month, after the first Ebola case reached our shores. In the darker corners of the Internet, others suggested that Obama was spreading Ebola to justify the imposition of martial law; still others charged that government health officials had conspired with pharmaceutical companies to foster the disease and then to hawk a vaccine to cure it.

How could anyone believe that our government would plot to harm its own citizens? Because it’s happened before. Over the past century, the American federal government has repeatedly conspired against the people who elect it. And that’s why so many people suspect that the same thing is happening now.

This image was provided to Wikimedia Commons by the German Federal Archive (Deutsches Bundesarchiv) as part of a cooperation project. The German Federal Archive guarantees an authentic representation only using the originals (negative and/or positive), resp. the digitalization of the originals as provided by the Digital Image Archive.

Seventy years ago, on 8 September 1944, a gas main exploded in London. Well, that’s what the newspapers said the next day, but can you believe everything you read in the press? Not many Londoners did. For one thing, it wasn’t an isolated incident. The papers went on to report a whole series of “gas main explosions” – dozens of them – over the course of the next two months.

What was causing the sudden spate of explosions? Britain had been at war for five years, but there were no longer any German bombers in the skies over London – the Royal Air Force had total air supremacy.

For the past few weeks, a number of Arabic-language social media users have been sharing screenshots and excerpts of a Hillary Clinton autobiography called “Password 360.” Many are shocked by one particular passage, in which the former secretary of state appears to concede that the United States, with the help of the Muslim Brotherhood, helped engineer the Islamic State extremist group.

That would be a startling admission — if it were true. Clinton’s new memoir contains no such passage. In fact, it isn’t even called “Password 360″ — it’s called “Hard Choices.” Direct U.S. involvement in the rise of the Islamic State is a conspiracy theory at best.

Unfortunately, it’s a powerful one. The BBC’s Suzanne Kianpour reports that the idea appears to hold sway in Lebanon. According to Kianpour, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry summoned U.S.

“These countries are not monolithic, there are forces fighting the corruption and there are forces that have totally been co-opted…The group that’s behind the network of control are the Jesuits, and there are also some groups behind them. One of these groups are hominids, they’re not human beings. They are very smart, they are not creative, they are mathematical. They have elongated skulls, they may produce offspring in mating with female humans, but that offspring is not fertile. We live in a world of secret societies, and secrets, and the information that ought to be public is not public.”

The initial paper produced results that weren’t entirely surprising. By surveying visitors to climate blogs, its authors found that free-market fans tended to reject scientific findings that had potential regulatory implications, something that’s been found by a variety of other researchers. But it also found that there is a population of people who doubt scientific findings simply because they tended to doubt nearly everything, ascribing a variety of things—the Moon landings, the World Trade Center attacks, etc.—to conspiracies. This might seem surprising, but the results held up when the same authors extended the study to the US population in general.

What’s probably less surprising is that some of the subjects of the initial paper responded with a new set of conspiracy theories, focused on the paper itself.

Conspiracies, of course, do occur. But, of course, not every theory is true. If yours isn’t built upon the following fallacies, perhaps it’s legit. Warp writes:

Most conspiracy theories don’t make sense nor withstand any scrutiny. They usually involve operations so immense that it’s basically impossible for them to be kept secret, and all the proof given by conspiracy theorists usually have a very simple explanation (usually much simpler than the explanation given by the theorists).

Yet conspiracy theories are very popular and appealing. Even when they don’t make sense and there’s just no proof, many people still believe them. Why?

One big reason for this is that some conspiracy theorists are clever. They use psychology to make their theories sound more plausible. They appeal to certain psychological phenomena which make people to tend to believe them. However, these psychological tricks are nothing more than logical fallacies. They are simply so well disguised that many people can’t see them for what they are.

Is the photo at right of a man known as Adolph Leipzig none other than der Führer? A Brazilian researcher as been granted permission to conduct genetic testing in an effort to prove her theory, the Daily Mail reports:

A startling new book claims Adolf Hitler actually escaped his hideout and died incognito in 1984 in a small town near Brazil’s border with Bolivia – and it can be proved by a picture.

The author believes the Fuhrer fled to Argentina before settling in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to hunt for buried treasure – with a map given to him by Vatican allies. As part of his elaborate ruse to escape detection, he also had a relationship with a black woman called Cutinga.

And you thought NSA spying was a big deal…but at least their agents are humanoid. Iran’s leading news agency Farsnews reports the true revelation from the Snowden leaks on their English-language site:

Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden revealed documents providing incontrovertible proof that an alien/extraterrestrial intelligence agenda is driving US domestic and international policy, and has been doing so since at least 1945, some media reports said.

Snowden’s documents further confirm, this report says, [aliens’] meetings in 1954 with US President Dwight D. Eisenhower where the “secret regime” currently ruling over America was established.

Most disturbingly, this FSB report warns, is that the [alien] agenda being implemented by the “secret regime” ruling the United States calls for the creation of a global electronic surveillance system meant to hide all true information about their presence here on earth as they enter into what one of Snowden’s documents calls the “final phase” of their end plan for total assimilation and world rule.

Russia Today speaks to Paul Hellyer, Canada's defense minister at the height of the Cold War, who claims that benevolent aliens infiltrated human civilization long ago:

During the Cold War, 1961, there were about 50 UFOs in formation flying south from Russia across Europe. The Supreme Allied Command investigated for 3 years and they decided that, with absolute certainty, four species - at least – had been visiting this planet for thousands of years.
How many [extraterrestrial] species are there? I used to think between two and twelve, but the reports that I’ve been getting from sources are that there are about 80 different species…"Tall Whites"…"Short Greys"…and some of them look just like us and you wouldn’t know if you walked past one on the street.
They come from various places. Different star systems – the Pleadis, Zeta Reticuli and several others…but in the past few months I have met [those] who made me aware that there are some in our own star system.